


i'm just a bad believer

by Randstad



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, DCU, DCU (Movies), Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:25:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5353946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/pseuds/Randstad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce's dreams about Superman were violent. His dreams about Clark Kent are hardly preferable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm just a bad believer

**Author's Note:**

> Kneejerk reaction to the trailer and hoo boy if you had told me five years ago I'd be writing Ben Affleck in sexual situations

In the first dream, the second dream, and the next four dreams after he sees Wayne Tower collapse in Metropolis, after he’s memorized the face on the statue and the composite face that the Bat-Computer has assembled from blurry video footage and worldwide personal accounts ( _perfect_ , so many of them say, _like a model, like a god_ ), Bruce’s imagination cuts it short when Superman tears off his mask and snaps his neck.

Every time the vision recurs--Superman’s hand around his neck, his thumb pushed just so--he wakes up nonplussed. He’s the Batman, after all; he’s had a million visions of his enemies killing him over the years, countless anxious near misses transformed in his sleeping mind to failures.

He doesn’t dwell on the moment of murder itself. Instead Alfred makes him coffee and over the top of the mug he thinks, yes, that would be how Superman would kill again, if he felt so inclined. Cut and dry, human bones like dry autumn twigs in his hands. The reduction of a body to breakable mass. 

He wouldn’t even breathe in the air from their last death rattle. Bruce’s research suggests he wouldn’t need to. 

  


-

  


At the gala Clark Kent barely crosses his eye, and when their hands touch Bruce’s mind has already wandered across the room, counted shoulders and exits, filed away the time and the number of minutes he’ll have to waste here until he can go home. He grunts his way through what he’s sure will be a short conversation, and then--

“--position on the bat vigilante in Gotham,” the voice cuts into his periphery, pointedly, and Bruce looks back at him, into a face that already seems to know him, into a face he realizes he already knows. Years of long training have eliminated Bruce’s flinching reflex, but in person, up close, staring into the face of the unknown given human shape, given unspeakable power, he’s nearly there. 

From a distance of less than two feet Superman’s face looks like someone cut it from glass. Not a hair out of place despite some painfully obvious best efforts. Behind the comic farce of his glasses there’s a brightness in his eyes. As though when he lighted on Earth he took a strip of starlight with him.

There’s a feeling that claws its way up Bruce’s spine suddenly, unfamiliar. Almost fear and almost intrigue, all at once.

The corner of his mouth rolls up. 

  


-

  


That morning, after the gala, after patrol, after hours of research, he has another dream. Superman again: the dusty hallway, the men in uniform. Superman draws in close, revulsion writ clearer than ever on his flawless face. The mask is peeled away and dropped callously to the sand.

And then Superman’s hand finds the nape of his neck, fingers and blunt clean fingernails threading in the hair at the nape of Bruce’s neck, tilting it up.

Superman’s lips next, hot and full, with a hard press of teeth. Bruce cuts his lip, even though his teeth are no sharper than a human man’s: white and square at the top, in fact. He tastes blood, feels the heat from Superman’s mouth like open face of an active volcano. 

His hands skim clinically over the back of Bruce’s neck, find the catches on the Batsuit. The electric arrays, the paralytic gas line in the seams, he must have disabled them. Or maybe they too have surrendered to him, powerless to fight him off. He pushes off the coat off Bruce’s shoulders, strips the pads from his knees. He knows the suit, knows him. He takes the suit apart surgically, until it’s just Bruce beneath, in his weathered skin and the shell of his hate, the Bat discarded, meaningless.

“... so much for civil liberties,” Bruce says.

“Civil liberties are for civilians,” Superman says. The acidity in his voice, like sheets of Gotham rain.

One of the men in armor comes up and wordlessly accepts Superman’s cape when he unclips it from his shoulders, folds it into a neat square and disappears into the dark corners of the dream. The suit next, from which emerges naked golden shoulders, arms, the whole of him decorated in muscle. Appalling in its perfection, as unmarked as if he came from a factory. And his cock between his legs, huge and magnificent.

Bruce’s arms jerk in the chains. There’s a moment in the tense white static of his mind where can’t tell whether he’s trying to move closer or away.

He looks off to the side, though, into the darkness of the corridor, as Superman draws his naked legs up, presses his beast of an erection against him, hot and undeniable--and then Bruce doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move or breathe as it pushes inside, finds a place for itself in Bruce’s body, which almost fights him, almost, but in the end betrays Bruce with its ready compliance. Worse still, it only hurts peripherally, the fact that Superman’s cock is a searing brand inside him culling only pleasure from his nerve endings, and he has to clench his jaw to cage his gasp.

The rest of his body where Superman presses close seems to burn everywhere, like he has the sun inside him, but his face is frozen in cruelty. All of it demands Bruce’s attention. Superman is everywhere, inside him, surrounding him. Impossible to fight.

And he knows it, drawn close, his breath flooding Bruce’s lungs. He rocks into him once, a slow steady pulse: Bruce startles, shivers, doesn’t make a sound.

But Superman can hear the skitter of Bruce’s heartbeat, the blood that thunders dizzily in his body. He doesn’t need further proof. He doesn’t even condescend to look down between them, at the last damning sign. 

Instead he tilts his head, close enough for another kiss. “Do you really think you can stop me like this?” Superman says, almost tenderly.

Bruce thinks, _I have to_ , but he can’t speak. He takes the kiss for himself, in the end, only because it’s as impotent a gesture as a punch would have been. He chips a tooth on Superman’s mouth, licks inside for more. And when Superman starts to fuck him, rough and bloody against the backdrop of rattling chains, uncannily steady despite the force in his thrusts, despite the haphazardness of Bruce’s captivity, Bruce takes it, soundless, furious. He has to. He’s the only one who can. 

  


-

  


Then the incident happens, the incident which Metropolis in its mounting love for its own mythology has named “Doomsday,” and Bruce finds out that he isn’t the only one who can. In the years to come Bruce will remember how the thought tasted, in the heat of battle, beneath the pervasive sense that he was going to die: bitter behind his teeth.

Millions of people think they need Superman. There are now at least three people on this planet that can kill him, Bruce himself included. 

But no one has seen the face that follows Bruce in his dreams. Its disdain. The eyes that looked past him even as the body tore into him. Even if it’s illusory, a figment of his overactive imagination, it’s the worst Superman can do--look at someone and see only still particles and squandered air, insignificance given shape and mass. 

Until that moment, in the ashes of their victory, Luthor apprehended, that Superman looks at him. And smiles.

It’s a gesture that Bruce doesn’t know how to comprehend for a second, or in the days that follow, with the exception of uncomfortable awareness of the fact that, alright, perhaps this, the smart relieved mouth, the bright eyes--he’s Superman, he can always do worse. He looks at Bruce quizzically, tentative and hopeful and _glad_ , and suddenly there’s a part of Bruce that misses being seen through, even though it never did happen in real life, because. He’s never functioned well in daylight. Doesn’t know what to do with being seen.

  


-

  


Weeks after Doomsday, he has the dream one last time. Superman takes off his mask, and between one second and the next Superman’s depthless scowl, the revulsion in his expression, vanishes completely; in its place is Clark Kent’s shuttered concern, the gentle unhappy downturn of his mouth. The ice in his eyes is gone, replaced with that damnable brightness again.

“You can’t control me,” Clark says.

His voice is kind. It’s a loaded statement when he’s not the one in chains.

“Someone still might have to,” Bruce says.

He believes it. Someone has to leash that power, know how to put it down when it rears its terrible face, just like they’d have to leash Bruce if he ever had it--just like if he ever got his hands on Superman, he doesn’t know what he’d do, how he’d do it, when he would ever stop--

Clark reaches up and pulls at the chains. They tear like paper in his hands. Bruce doesn’t hear the clank when he sets them aside.

“Or you could just trust me,” Clark says, plaintive and gentle suddenly in his stupid plaids and pleated pants, his tie a centimeter askew, and his hands are open, his eyes so curious and hopeful, like he’s never seen anyone like Bruce before, and. 

Bruce knows, suddenly, what he’d do if he got his hands on Clark.

He’s always been a lucid dreamer. He keeps his damn hands to himself. 

  


-

  


The dream fades instead of jolts this time. Bruce’s sheets, when he sits up, are damp with sweat. The wall clock informs him that it’s still morning. Normally he wakes up after noon.

If Bruce is honest with himself, he hasn’t had a good morning in years. The only time he sees sunrises is beneath the dark angles of the cowl, in the mortal remains of the night. And all daylight has ever done is shed light on his failures, on the hurts in his city he was powerless to prevent. On the fact that he wakes up alone.

But today the sky outside is crisp and bright, unnatural for Gotham City in its wide sprawling blues, and the revelation of his loneliness just feels tired. On his nightstand his phone blinks back at him with a missed call: Metropolis area code and digits Bruce memorized well before he ever met the man in person, breathed his air, saved his neck, wanted him.

Nothing to be done for it now. Bruce reaches over, lets his hand drop onto the callback button, and watches through the curtains, grudging, as the sun lets itself in.


End file.
